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Publication
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The highway traffic size and loads have been continuously increasing all over Europe. At the same time, the expectations of users have been growing. They need more safe, durable and comfortable highway surfaces which make their trips low-cost and do not accept frequent traffic disturbance due to road maintenance and rehabilitation. The obvious answer of the highway engineering to this challenge is the continuous development and improvement of highway construction, rehabilitation and maintenance techniques further. The state-of-the art review of NR2C Work Package 2 on European highway innovations (Deliverable 2.1[1]) has clearly demonstrated the typical trends of innovative road construction, rehabilitation and maintenance which are as follows: • the use of very high quality (premium) basic materials eventually with their special treatment, • the establishment of sophisticated construction, rehabilitation and maintenance techniques utilising up-to-date scientific achievements, • the development of special measures for enhancing traffic safety even in extreme conditions, • decreasing the whole life (life cycle) costs of road pavements by constructing long-life variants with infrequent maintenance and rehabilitation need, and, consequently, minimal traffic disturbance, • the wider use of industrial by-products in road engineering without reducing pavement performance, • the wider use of recycling (eventually-re-use) of bound pavement structural layers in order to reduce the need for primary basic materials without jeopardising the performance of pavements, • giving priority to low-energy pavement structural variants reacting to the ever increasing energy prices and the limited availability of crude oil supplies, • there are some “blue sky” type innovations which utilise some new scientific results eventually coming from science areas far away from highway engineering. (...)